


Look Again

by thelilacfield



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 09:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13678824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelilacfield/pseuds/thelilacfield
Summary: Everyone is born with a name written on their wrist, over where their pulse beats and their veins rise blue against their skin. The name of the person destined to make them whole.Wanda Maximoff is a medical miracle. She doesn't have a soulmark.





	Look Again

**A/N:** Written for the ScarletVision Valentine’s Day Event 2018. Based on the prompt ‘Soulmates AU where your soul mate’s name appears as a tattoo on your wrist when you are born’.

* * *

 

Everyone is born with a name written on their wrist, over where their pulse beats and their veins rise blue against their skin. The name of the person destined to make them whole. It's always been that way, as far back as records go. Websites and newspaper directories exist to help people find their other half, whether that person lives two streets away or on the other side of the world. Society is wrapped tightly around soulmates and how life becomes complete when they meet.

Wanda Maximoff is a medical miracle. She doesn't have a soulmark.

Her twin brother does. Pietro has another half, a person out in the world waiting for him,  _Crystal_  scrawled across his wrist. Her parents have each other's names, twining across their wrists and pressing together when they hold hands and smile into each other's eyes. And her wrist is stubbornly blank, no matter how hard she wills a name to appear.

The other children on her street make fun of her for it. They say she must be broken, defective, so ruined that no one could ever want her. Pietro defends her viciously, throwing rocks and punches and poisonous words that land him in repeated trouble.

Two of the worst bullies, boys taller and older and broader than Pietro, make her cry one late September afternoon, taunting her that she'll be alone forever, that no one could ever want someone like her, that she was never meant to be happy. Her brother smudges a tear away with the pad of his thumb, and turns to the boys already raising his fist. Quicker and lighter he may be, but he's no match for brute strength.

Holding an ice pack wrapped in a towel to his black eye that night, hunched up in their bedroom with only their nightlight to see by, Wanda whispers, "Why did you hit them, Pietro? You should've walked away."

"They made you cry," he says stubbornly, folding his arms and jutting out his chin, wincing when he bends his split knuckles. "They're not allowed to do that. You're not broken."

"I don't have a soulmark," she says, swallowing the lump in her throat. Saying it makes her so profoundly sad, though she knows she'll say it thousands of times throughout her life. "Everyone's supposed to have one. I must be broken."

"No!" Pietro protests, and grabs around on the floor until he finds a marker, uncapping it and clumsily scrawling  _PIETRO MAXIMOFF_  onto her wrist. Turning the pen onto his own wrist, he covers his real soulmark writing her name, and gives her a gap-toothed grin. "I'll always be here for you. That's a soulmate."

"No, your soulmate is your romantic love, the person you marry and have babies with," she says, rolling her eyes at her brother. "Like Mama and Papa."

"You'll fall in love anyway," he insists. "People don't fall in love because of some writing on their wrists. It's because their hearts want each other. The name just helps you find your perfect person faster."

She tries not to feel broken, but it's hard when every day brings another story about a pair of soulmates finding each other, a happy couple beaming out of the television screen. As she grows up, going from the orphanage to the streets, people begin to find each other around her, falling in love faster than falling asleep, and she remains lonely. People aren't looking for a waste of their time like her when they have the name of the person meant for them on their wrist.

Instead, she develops a fascination with other people's soulmarks. Lying next to Pietro at night, trying to sleep, she stares at his wrist and wonders who his soulmate might be. If finding a newspaper or access to one of the web databases might lead him to her. Whether she's looking for him, or whether she's laid back about it like he is, flirting with other girls and not making any effort to save anything for his soulmate like tradition dictates he should.

The girl who gives Wanda her first kiss has a soulmark. It's another girl's name, in heavy-handed extravagantly loopy writing, but not a Sokovian name. Anika, who has bleached hair and dark eyes and very soft lips, will have to turn to the databases and travelling to find her other half. Wanda is nothing more than a distraction to her, but Wanda's wrist is blank and no one is waiting for her. No one is searching, opening every newspaper and scouring the depths of the Internet for her name. She has no one to save kisses for, and instead follows Anika further into the night and the quiet of a hostel and a bed with a rusted frame and a mattress with busted springs.

Soldiers and scientists in Strucker's base keep their wrists covered, and she understands why. In a profession like theirs, knowing the name of someone's soulmate means knowing their heart, and in a world of magic and monsters no one can afford to give up that knowledge so easily. Pietro starts to wear long sleeves, hiding his soulmark from the people around them with dark smiles and darker motives, but she has nothing to hide. No heart exposed on her skin.

The name on Strucker's wrist has faded to grey, the way marks do when someone loses their soulmate. She will never have to go through that, to have the pain of watching her happiness die. Despite the pain he puts her through with his experiments, she hopes that he met his soulmate, and had time with her. The thought of knowing there is someone out there for her and never even getting to meet them is heartbreaking. Almost enough to make her grateful that she has no one.

When she awakes with chaos inside her, power rising in crackling crimson on her skin, she can't help glancing at her wrist, wondering if this change in her might have shifted fate and brought someone for her. But her skin is as flawless as ever, her veins light beneath her skin, and she grits her teeth and concentrates on anger instead. Plotting revenge on Tony Stark, and the Avengers, and the world that has seen fit to curse her with a lifetime of loneliness.

Ultron will help with that. He is ruthless, knows the secrets of every Avengers, knows the names on their wrists. While Pietro sleeps, Wanda sits awake with Ultron, watching the cradle humming as it forms a new body for him to transfer into and destroy the Avengers, and he tells her who they love. Tony Stark's wrist, though kept carefully hidden in most photographs, reads  _Virginia Potts_. Steve Rogers bears a fading  _Margaret Carter_  beneath his uniform. Natasha Romanoff has never told a living soul who her soulmate is. Clint Barton's wrist reads  _Laura Richards_. Bruce Banner's soulmark says his soulmate is  _Elizabeth Ross_ , but the Hulk's name is different, and if the rumours are true it reads  _Natasha Romanoff_. Thor has a series of names, some already greyed out, and has said in interviews that more will appear, as his people live hundreds of human lifetimes and therefore have hundreds of soulmates. As she files this information at the back of her mind to remember for the fights to come, distracted by the whirring of the cradle, Wanda absentmindedly scratches her wrist, and Ultron talks on and on about the crimes of the Avengers.

But they have to abandon Ultron, for the sake of humanity. Though she may hate the world some days, and wish it had seen fit to afford her to same chance at happiness every other person gets, Wanda doesn't want to see it destroyed. So she helps Rogers, stopping the train from speeding out of control, a twinge of sympathy for him in her chest when she remembers that his soulmark is fading, that whoever Margaret Carter is she's dying, and that must account for the hollowness behind Rogers' eyes.

Seeing the cradle now nauseates her, knowing what's inside, what Ultron's plans for the world were. Her wrist flares up with itching, and as the argument spirals around her she rakes her nails over her skin, leaving red lines on the white, gritting her teeth against the urge to scratch harder, draw blood, the same urge her parents helped her repress when she was a child and had chicken pox.

When Thor descends from nowhere, and summons lightning that surges the power indicators on the cradle, every light flickering to life, her wrist  _burns_ , agonising, and despite attempts to bite her lip and be silent she can't help a squeal at how much it hurts. Pietro glances at her in concern, and she grips at her wrist tightly to try and stem the pain, and her skin is almost unbearably hot to the touch, and she wonders if this could be what dying feels like.

The man that bursts out of the cradle immediately seems like someone to her. Not just because she saw his mind while he was still inside, still wholly Ultron and planning to destroy the world, when he dreamed of destruction. But as he straightens up, smoke pouring out of the cradle, something in her soul sings out when he meets her eyes, and the blue of his immediately imprints on her memory. She watches the motion of his throat when he swallows, and he blinks, and finally opens his mouth and speaks. Just one word.

"Wanda?"

"Vision?"

She has no idea where the name comes from, how she knows it, but the way he's looking at her and the way he recognised her must mean something. And when his attention is dragged away from her by the insistent chatter of the other Avengers, she glances down at her wrist to see if something burned her, and her jaw drops slackly to see  _VISION_  written across her skin in neat block letters. Her soulmate, apparently. The one fate chose for her, newly-emerged into the world, yellow cape at his shoulders as he speaks earnestly of not knowing what he is but being sure that Ultron should be destroyed. Undeniably causing her heart to skip a beat when he lifts Thor's hammer with no effort, as the rest of the team stares at him in shock.

In the midst of battle, she loses her brother. The first person to love her, who wrote her name on his wrist and his name on hers when they were children in an attempt to reassure her that she had people who cared whether fate chose a romantic love for her or not, gone in a flash and taking half her heart with him, the pain so real it may as well have been her riddled with bullets. She falls to her knees in the dust, alone in the centre of Sokovia destroyed, a helpless screaming tearing from her in a ripple of power that disintegrates the robots around her.

She rips Ultron's metal heart from his chest, weighs it in her hand, and with a cry of anguish tosses it out of the window of the wrecked train and into the nothingness as Sokovia starts to fall. Here and now, she'll die, to go and be with her brother and her parents, sinking into the sea with her country. No regrets. No one left behind. Except her soulmate. Newly-found, and lost so soon.

But not so. Because Vision somehow finds her, jerking her into his arms and flying her away from the destruction, and she's so aware of the lines of his body, the warmth of his synthetic skin, how he grips her and how blue his eyes are when he gazes into hers. When he sets her on one of the lifeboats, in the split-second that they stare at each other before he leaves again to finish their job, she catches a glimpse of his wrist, her own name in her own handwriting sprawling across his skin, and despite how hollow she is with losing her brother a spark of warmth fills her.

The days pass in a blur, the Avengers allowing her to bring Pietro's body to the US with them and bury him in the grounds of their new compound, planting flowers and a tree over his grave and marking it with a smooth stone, Stark promising he'll get an engraving made for him. Vision stands at her side through the short memorial service, while she whispers words in both Sokovian and English that she wishes Pietro was alive to hear, wishes she'd said more often, and as the tears roll down her cheeks he silently holds out a handkerchief.

Her sleep is disturbed by nightmares of Sokovia flying through the sky, of the wind howling in her ears as she falls to her inevitable death, of Pietro's bullet-riddled body bleeding out in the dust with no one to kiss him goodbye, of the girl somewhere in the world who watched her soulmark fade to grey and could do nothing to save him. She sleeps on the couch rather than in her room, waking every hour.

"Ms. Maximoff?" Breathing still unsteady and jerky, she looks up to Vision standing in the corner of the room, half shrouded in shadow, and can only give him the slightest hint of a smile she's so exhausted and miserable. "Why aren't you in bed?"

"I can't sleep," she says shortly. "At least here I have easier access to food and the training room in the middle of the night."

"Oh," Vision says shortly, and hesitantly moves closer to her, sitting cautiously at the other end of the couch. "May I ask why?"

"Nightmares," she answers, trying to keep her breathing steady and not dwell on the memory of her dreams, of her parents and Pietro begging her to save them while she cries helplessly.

"I see," Vision says, and moves closer. "Ms. Maximoff, may I ask you an odd question?" She nods, and he holds out his wrist, showing her clearer than before that her name is looping across his skin. "Everything I've read tells me that this is my soulmark, and that it being your name means we are fated to fall in love."

"That's pretty much what it means," she says, and Vision frowns. "Everyone has one."

"So...your brother had one?" he asks, and she nods slightly. "What happens to the other person in the pair if one dies?"

"Their mark fades to grey," she says. "So there's a girl somewhere out there with Pietro's name on her wrist and it turned grey and she'll never get to meet him. And I  _lived_. I never had a mark until you burst out of that cradle, I never thought I had a hope of having someone, then I made it and he  _didn't_. He's  _dead_!"

"You don't have a mark?" Vision asks softly, and Wanda blinks away the tears in her eyes and shakes her head, holding out her wrist for him.

"It appeared the second you lived," she says, and Vision stares, instinctively reaching out a hand to trace a fingertip over his name on her skin, making her shiver. "It was blank for my whole life. Then you turn up out of the blue, and it's you."

"Oh," he breathes, and stares down at her wrist. "So...so you're my soulmate? We are fated to be together?"

"If that's what the names on our wrists say," she says with a shrug, and when she looks at him there's such wonder in his eyes that her chest clenches. "Vision, it's just writing. It doesn't make a relationship."

" _Wanda_ ," he whispers, and the way he says her name makes her shiver, her heart skip a beat and her breath catch in her throat. Makes her gaze drop to his lips, and instinct spur her to lean in and press her mouth softly to his. Light bursts behind her eyes as they fall closed, dizzying her, and when he cups a hand to her cheek she leans helplessly into his touch.

"So that's what it feels like," she breathes when they break apart, and Vision smiles gently at her, his eyes very blue and so filled with warmth as they rest on her.

"The writing doesn't make a relationship," he says dully, lowering his gaze from hers, a shadow creeping across his face.

"You're right," she says, and turns him back to her, giving him a smile. "Wanting someone does." Leaning in once again, she murmurs, "Vision," before she kisses him, the name on her wrist and on her lips and in her heart.

"Wanda," he breathes against her lips, and pulls her closer. And she sinks into her miracle of a soulmate, happiness rising warm in her chest as his arms slide around her and he continues to kiss her and whisper her name as dawn streaks the sky pale blue beyond the window and life returns to the compound.


End file.
